Author’s Response

It is at once humbling and exhilarating to be able to see one’s book through the eyes of scholars whose own works have been an inspiration or promise to be a guiding light. Iyko Day’s Alien Capital thinks about how racialized migrants can come to embody capital or labor: the flesh and blood standing in for abstractions so central to the political economy of exploitation in our time.1 I eagerly look forward to Salar Mameni’s Terracene, which will examine the cultural and religious practices around oil and bitumen forged by people who live in a hydrocarbon world.2 Hatim El-Hibri’s moving account of the social and political devastation wrought by the Beirut port explosion reinforces his message in Visions of Beirut that infrastructures concretize “an ongoing process of dispossession, accumulation, and contestation.”3 And last but not least, before and after all my travel and conversations with the Filipino/a/x seafarers who made container shipping legible to me, I voraciously read Kale Bantigue Fajardo’s luminous Filipino Crosscurrents, which sensitively and coruscatingly sets out the simultaneously brutal and meaningful life of seafaring.4

As the generous authors of these comments note, the last few years have made the centrality of maritime shipping and infrastructures starkly visible. The wrenching aftershocks of the Beirut port’s destruction, as El-Hibri notes, are still felt in the everyday lives of the Lebanese and Beirut residents more specifically. He writes, “One thing that the instantaneity of an explosion and the ongoing process of decay have in common is that both are the product of strategies of accumulation. Both can involve some people being made into surplus populations whose demands are seen by the powerful as a nuisance to be managed.” In writing about Aden and the Yemenis on whose lives violence has been inflicted, I wanted to show that maritime infrastructures and commerce do not teleologically end up at shiny automated ports. Though the particular manifestations and mechanics of destruction and violence in Beirut and Aden differ, in both places both domestic and international powers see the exuberant and just demands of citizens and workers, as El-Hibri points out, “as a nuisance to be managed.”

It pleases me to no end that Fajardo finds resonances between Sinews of War and Trade and transpacific movements and lives and knowledges. Fajardo’s suggestion of “future comparative or relational decolonial studies” of military and commercial bases of course put me in mind of Deborah Cowen’s powerful account of the fungibility of such infrastructures in Iraq and the Philippines in her inspiring and rich The Deadly Life of Logistics.5 But Fajardo also makes another suggestion: to think about tourism and cruise ships alongside military and commercial maritime transport. This is a brilliant suggestion, especially as Covid-19 has made clear the global inequalities and workplace injustices that the ultimate tourist transport—the cruise ship—embodies. Cruise ships also allow us to engage with the life of seafaring crews and overseas workers who may not helm a ship or fix an engine but whose work as cleaners, cooks, and entertainers in the mobile megacities that are cruise ships even further demonstrates the depth of racial capitalism. The suggestion also put me in mind of Dubai’s economic motto: to advance the three T’s, transportation, trade, and tourism. The discussion of the Spratly Islands also brings in the question of geopolitics. The idea of using marine reserves as a way of designating certain places off-limits to military exercise is of course immensely appealing. That said, geopolitics can also affect such environmental designations: the last time a great power tried to designate an oceanic space a marine reserve, the Blair administration was trying to evade scrutiny around the expulsion of Chagossians from their island homes so that the United States could use the island of Diego Garcia as a base. A marine reserve there would have prevented outside scrutiny or islander return to their homes, while preserving the area as a military base for the United States. The extent to which power plays shape even calls to thalassemic ecological conservation is of course another characteristic of this degraded and catastrophic age. Fajardo’s brilliant call to look at how affluence and geopolitical privileges shape (tourist, military, and maritime) mobilities in radically striated, racialized, and classed ways must be taken up for us to better understand how ships shape social relations here and across the oceans.

Day’s perspicacious reading of my book brings up three questions. The first is about “what remains of efforts to restore sovereign territoriality to colonized peoples” in the aftermath of decolonization, where rapacious exploitation of people and resources in the interest of capital accumulation continues apace, but now by the national or comprador bourgeoisie. Day’s question is difficult to answer, not least because even where the shape of capital accumulation has shifted and local and regional actors have stepped in the gaps left by vacating colonial powers to reap profits from and exploit the labor of global migrants, the center of gravity of capital accumulation, the place where rules, laws, and regulations shaping maritime trade and transport are determined, is still firmly in the North Atlantic. Perhaps sovereignty must be reimagined and rewritten in ways that account for both these global inequalities and the more local forms of exploitation; this might mean that we need to think about sovereignty as popular rather than territorial. The second question Day poses is about what avenues of organizing may be effective in a system whereby, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, class is articulated through race. I hinted at some of these new avenues in the book, but much new research gives more expansive responses to this question. Alex Boodrookas writes about Filipino migrant workers in Kuwait—where the legal right to collective bargaining for migrant workers does not exist—organizing via unions in their homelands.6 Charmaine Chua and Spencer Cox write about logistic mobilization in Amazon warehouses.7 Rafeef Ziadah and Adam Hanieh show that despite the catastrophe of Covid-19 in the Middle East, forms of struggle have gone on there.8 And Katy Fox-Hodess analyzes how appeals to the law and transnational acts of solidarity can be put to the service of those who have been racially proletarianized.9 There are many others working both as activists and scholars on this very subject. Recent organization by warehouse operators, Amazon employees, and logistics and transport workers provides the perfect exemplar for understanding these new forms of organization. Finally, Day asks whether there are “modes of cultural resistance” that can pry open the fissures within an unjust and unequal system of exploitation. This is an important and generative but very difficult question, in part because I think both resistance and culture are dynamic things, always unsettled, and always metamorphosing in ways that are difficult to foretell. Despite my training in U.S.-style political science, I am loath to make a prediction, in part because my life and my subjectivity has been shaped by the Iranian Revolution, which was famously unthinkable, unanticipated, and unforeseen until it happened.

Finally, I was moved by Mameni’s beautiful rereading of pelagic spaces as “alive, biodiverse entities.” Mameni astutely appreciates something of the future direction of my research. I am indeed interested in the lives in the seas and, through a felicitous coincidence with Mameni’s own interests, in how oceanic abundance is constantly thrashed and trashed by hydrocarbon corruption. The more I researched the maritime infrastructures of the Arabian Peninsula and “the bodies of water lapping against [its] shores,” the more I wanted to understand how oil and gas have been woven through the warp and woof of our lives, entered our vernacular, and shaped our dreams and ideas and horizons.

Mameni’s shimmering suggestion to “think[] with the sea as a living entity,” El-Hibri’s call to incorporate destruction along with accumulation, Fajardo’s insistence on remembering multiple forms of mobility together, and Day’s call for imagining new modalities of resistance will all be crucial in how I will shape my next research project. For this I am infinitely grateful.

Laleh Khalili is the Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author most recently of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020) and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books, 2023). She is currently working on a large project on the entanglements of oil in the worlds of finance, banking, shipping, and work.